Nizayn
Appearance Nizayn is of average height and build for a Draenei. She has no real distinguishing features and wears her grey-tones hair in a simple parted style. She usually wears reds, oranges and yellows and generally carries large, fairly simple weapons. Her default facial expression appears, to most races, to be somewhere between puzzled and frowning. She invariably smells faintly of a peppery, woody oil she uses as a perfume. Personality Nizayn has a habit of presenting the face you want to see or the one that will simplify getting what she wants. So to most people she will appear friendly, helpful and display manners in keeping with the company she is in. She will happily lie about her past, if she cannot simply evade the questions. People's first impressions of her are almost always that she is nondescript, a not very interesting but nice enough person. She rarely trusts people, instead seeing most interactions as a mutually beneficial but strictly temporary arrangement. Strangely for a member of a long-lived race Nizayn does not think in the long term very often. Her world-view is centred on everything being temporary and she tends to focus on doing things that will benefit her in the near term. She does, however, recognise the value of reputation and is careful to maintain a good standing with factions she recognises as important. Nizayn maintains a degree of emotional detachment that guarantees that she can disengage and walk away from just about anything in her life at short notice. This manifests in the highly portable nature of her possessions. She can carry almost everything she owns, and the things that she cannot she stores in remote caches rather than a single dwelling place. Her main distractions in life are study and exploration. She is fascinated with understanding people, places and artefacts and how they have shaped each other. She flips between being very studious and suddenly full of the need to go and find things out by looking herself. She writes her own histories and studies on a huge range of topics, but keeps them well hidden. She loves music, especially Vrykul folk music and Troll drumming. She is also slightly embarrassed about her musical tastes. For obvious reasons Nizayn hates Orcs, Blood Elves and any one who serves them. She has a horror of the Forsaken as well, fuelled by their protection of the Blood Elves and their wanton destruction pollution of places like Southshore. Trolls, Tauren and Goblins she is indifferent to. She sees her own leaders as too long-sighted and decries their willingness to sacrifice their people now for a possible future benefit, extrapolated based on the assumption that they know what the world will throw at them. Time and time again she has seen that this assumption is deeply flawed. Background Nizayn is young for a Draenei, having been born some time during their flight from Kil'jaeden and reaching adulthood before they found Draenor. This means that unlike many she has no memories of the Eredar civilisation or Argus. Her earliest memories are of their search for a home, an urgent hunt to find somewhere to hide from an implacable enemy that culminated with the settling of Draenor. With her family and friends Nizayn built a home, a life, and began to understand how important these things were to her. The brutal assault by the Orcs shattered everything she had built up over the years. Much of her family fought and died in the war, Nizayn being lucky to survive. She saw no great pitched battles, just an endless series of squalid skirmishes slowly killing everyone she cared about, one by one. During their periods of hiding in Zangamarsh Nizayn and her few remaining friends threw themselves into martial training. They harboured fantasies of revenge, of a bloody cleansing of Draenor and its remaking as a true home of their people. Obviously this dream was strongly discouraged by older, wiser heads who really understood the threat to them and also felt that this was not in keeping with the principles that the Naaru had taught them. Instead of the wholesale slaughter of their new nemesis the young hot headed proto-warriors were used as part of the assault on the Exodar. Their losses were horrible, bitterness and anger turning out to be poor substitutes for actual battle experience. Victory was bought, however, and the Draenei fled Draenor. The subsequent sabotage and crash of the Exodar resulted in the death or disappearance of many more of those close to Nizayn. She was shocked by what had happened, she was angry that her friends' lives had bought nothing more than a renewed flight from their enemies and she had little hope left that this new world would be any different to Draenor. Giving up she just walked away from the crash site without looking back. Those she left behind felt betrayed by her indifference and she has not had any contact or dealings with any of the people she once called friends or family. Since then she has wandered. She claims to herself that she doesn't ally herself to any causes, to be acting purely in her own interest at all times. Mostly this is true. Her greatest loves are learning and discovery, an outwards questing that keeps her from introspection and despair. So she wanders, seeking out new peoples, new places and new things. To facilitate this she often gets caught up in the periphery of the great events that shape Azeroth but avoids anything resembling responsibility or stability. Recent activities During the Northrend campaigns Nizayn relocated to Dalaran, finding work as a mercenary and guard for the traders and settlers who had followed the armies north. She played no part in the larger battle against the Scourge other than to be part of the machine that fed and armed them. After the fall of the Lich King she spent much of her time studying the Vrykul and their history, living and working around Dalaran and Grizzly Hills. Nizayn is fascinated by the Northrend cultures and their relationship with the Earhen and the Titans. This is where she picked up her slightly embarrassing taste for Vrykul folk music. She saw very little of Deathwing's madness, hearing only rumours and then the full story after the event. For much of this time she was in the far north, archiving and preserving what she could of the Hyldnir culture before it changed forever. Another project of hers was to be accepted, to some degree, by the Skadir raiders in order to study their ways. The call to arms to fight Garrosh and his reinvigorated Kor'kron in the new world of Pandaria did reach her and she went there with two aims in mind. Explore the place and kill as many Orcs as she could. This swirl of negative emotions did not endear her to the Pandaren and she found most of them profoundly annoying. In the Krasang Wilds she fell in with some Northrend veterans and they formed an effective team specialising in unfair fights. They ambushed and killed the Kor'kron whenever they could, always working to make sure they fought on their terms and in ways that ensured victory. For this reason they didn't help with defending the Alliance landings or any of the other strategic aims of the main war machine. This made them unpopular with the forces there, which bothered the veterans far more than it did Nizayn. When word came down that her nominal leader had volunteered them to join the assault on Ogrimmar, presumably as an attempt to redeem themselves in the eyes of the Alliance commanders, Nizayn walked away again. She saw too many parallels with what had happened to her friends during the capture of the Exodar and retreated back to Dalaran to resume her study of the frozen north. History with Immortalis Very limited. Outwardly Nizayn is helpful and willing to do anything if asked by the Immortalis leadership. She does not usually actively work towards their goals without being directed to, however. For her Immortalis was a way to get access to the archives they own and a useful tool to help her exploration. For that reason she is scrupulously careful about her reputation with them, carefully making sure no word of anything they may disapprove of gets back to them (such as her actions in the Krasang Wilds). Essentially Nizayn has few acquaintances in the guild, she maintains a respectable façade and is willing to pay a 'price' for her membership. However she has not settled with them and, in her mind, the option always remains to just walk away. As ever she is not thinking in the longer term and sees herself as working towards her own interests. Category:Character